Coming Soon

Artist. Public intellectual. Political activist. James Baldwin was all of these and more. Raised in the slums of Depression-era Harlem in New York City, Baldwin would become an author and activist of international renown—one whose legacy has continued long beyond his death in 1987. Who was James Baldwin? How did he become the master of multiple literary genres and a champion for some of the era’s most notable political and social causes? And how is his influence still being felt today?

In On Xi Jinping, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd provides an authoritative account of the ideological worldview driving Chinese behaviour both domestically and on the world stage—that of President Xi Jinping, who now holds near-total control over the Chinese Communist Party and is now, in effect, president-for-life. Rudd argues that Xi’s worldview differs significantly from those of the leaders who preceded him, and that this ideological shift is reflected in the real world of Chinese policy and behaviour.

Drawing on their unrivalled access throughout the Labour party, the Times and Sunday Times investigative duo behind Left Out now present the explosive inside story of Labour’s transformation and general election under Starmer. This is the definitive telling of a momentous time for the party: either their election as the first Labour government since the Blair/Brown era, or a catastrophic mishandling of a huge lead in the opinion polls. Either way, the story centres on Starmer's relentless and single-minded pursuit of power, and on the inevitable turmoil and carnage.

In 1647, the Parliamentarians were divided. They had won the first civil war and the king was in custody, but disagreements over the way forward had led to a stalemate. As the leader of one party, Oliver Cromwell found himself again at the center of events. In the second volume of his pioneering biography, Ronald Hutton traces Cromwell's career from 1647 through to his seizure of supreme power.

In The Hemlock Cup, award-winning historian Bettany Hughes brings to vivid life one of the most influential thinkers the world has ever known: Socrates of Athens. A maverick philosopher who philosophised in squares and public arenas rather than the courts of kings, Socrates left his indelible mark on the entirety of Western civilisation - yet the life of the man himself is shrouded in mystery.

James Stuart was a gay man before the word homosexual even existed. He fell in love three times – with Sandie, Robert, and Steenie – and he was infatuated three more times – with Huntley, Ruthven, and Philip. We have so much on the six wives of Henry VIII, why not the six loves of James I? There has never been a biography of King James that looks honestly at the entirety of his private life, much less at the men he loved over the course of that life.

Istanbul, 1537. The greatest of the Ottoman Sultans is at his personal apogee and the pinnacle of world power. With both Christianity and Islam riven by schism, he is mighty enough to maul different enemies in different hemispheres at the same time. But a terrible crisis is building that will rip Suleyman’s family apart as his beloved wife Hurrem wages pitiless war against his first-born son, Mustafa, and the boy’s mother Mahidevran.

From a pioneering Black feminist and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, an urgent and exhilarating memoir-manifesto-handbook about how to rein in the excesses of cancel culture so we can truly communicate and solve problems together.

Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir will chart how she went from being a shy child from a working-class family in Ayrshire to the steps of Bute House as Scotland’s first female and longest serving First Minister. It will detail her interactions with a range of notable figures, giving her unique in-the-room perspective on the most eventful and tumultuous era in modern Scottish and British politics.

Over the course of five years, Simon Hart had a front-row seat to the most turbulent times in recent British political history. From negotiations around Brexit to the impact of Liz Truss’s extraordinary forty-nine-day premiership and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he’s seen and heard it all. And starting in 2022, under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, he witnessed successive dramas unfold, all while holding down the (often misunderstood) position of chief whip.

In 1879, King Leopold II of Belgium launched an ambitious plan to plunder Africa’s resources. The key to cracking open the continent, or so he thought, was its elephants — if only he could train them. And so he commissioned the charismatic Irish adventurer Frederick Carter to ship four tamed Asian elephants from India to the East African coast, where they were marched inland towards Congo. The ultimate aim was to establish a training school for African elephants. Following in the footsteps of the four elephants, Roberts pieces together the story of this long-forgotten expedition.

Born into the English Wars of the Roses, educated in the European Renaissance, enthralled by the Age of Exploration and ultimately destroyed by Henry VIII, Thomas More is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in English history. Thomas More: A Life is the definitive biography of this hypnotic, flawed figure. Overturning many received interpretations of the sixteenth century, Joanne Paul shows Thomas More to have been an intellectual and political giant of his age, central to the making of modern Europe.

Returning to Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, Fritz Bauer – a gay Jewish lawyer and outspoken critic of Hitler – was determined to reclaim the Germany he had once loved. But he soon saw that the perpetrators of the Holocaust had largely got away with their crimes. Top Nazi officers – mass-murders and cruel sadists – had been given plum jobs at major German companies; held prestigious offices in top universities; were in positions of power as lawyers, judges and political advisors.

After 30 years of service, Neil Basu retired from the Metropolitan Police as the most senior officer of colour in the UK and only the fourth in its history to reach such a rank. Turmoil chronicles his rise to the top, the deep-seated discrimination he encountered at every level, and the ever-present shadow of racism that ran throughout his career.

How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet—in spite of anything and everything—they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for Woman, Life, Freedom by a woman still fighting for a free Iran.

Alice Litman died by suicide in May 2022, aged just twenty years old, having already waited almost three years for her first appointment at a gender identity clinic. In stunningly beautiful prose, Caroline Litman captures the realities of an often-messy journey navigating both her daughter’s transition and the days, weeks and months after Alice’s death.

We all know that at some point in life, we will experience pain, uncertainty and loss. Widowhood, redundancy, a life-changing diagnosis, pregnancy loss, or a global pandemic. So how can we weather the storms, and cope with whatever comes next? No one can answer this better than Lucy Easthope, an emergency planner whose job is to support survivors of major disasters. She has been there after countless earthquakes, fires and floods. Time and again she has watched how people rebuild: the work, the pitfalls and the fragile joy.

In The Greatest Comeback Ever, Joe Concha examines the most tone-deaf, patently unhinged predictions from the 2024 race. Liberals attacked Trump every way they could, but each attack made him stronger because the left and its allies in the media had no idea what the American people actually wanted: Major change from the disastrous last four years.

On a March night in 2000, two deputy sheriffs serving a warrant were shot in Atlanta, Georgia. One was severely wounded while the other would die a day later. The shooting kicked off a large manhunt in search of the alleged cop killer. Four days later in Alabama, authorities found their man—Jamil Al-Amin. He was a Muslim leader with the title of Imam in the West End neighborhood of Atlanta. He was also the man formerly known as H. Rap Brown. He was a charismatic Black radical in the late '60s.

Throughout his career as an author, journalist, television commentator, and head of a presidential library and foundation, Mark Updegrove has had the privilege of getting to know seven U.S. Presidents, from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama. In Make Your Mark, he offers incisive, compelling sketches of these modern presidents and the character trait that made each suited to his moment in the Oval Office and underlies his most significant accomplishments.